I see that in Canada's election, where there were something like 13 million ballot-papers, they counted all the votes by hand, and did so in four hours or so. And I assume that included recounts. (I gather that the 62% turn out was a record low for Canada, and conmsidwered a bit disgraceful...)P>Couldn't they just ship all the ballot-papers from Florida up across the Canadian border, and they could sort the whole thing out over the weekend, including a couple of recounts if need be. And they wouldn't have one single Republican or Democrat involved in counting the votes. Either doing the counting or trying to stop the counting.
As for recounts - the only way to get an accurate recount of a machine vote like that has to be a manual recount. That was never carried out effectively, and Bush's team made every effort to stop such a recount being made, and I doubt if anybody either Republican or Democrat really sincerely believes that it is less accurate to check the votes by hand.
If Bush had been making noises about how to make sure that a manual recount was carried out more effectively and fairly, and rule out any kind of bias that would have been reasonable and fair, and a responsible thing to be doing. But he wasn't doing that.
And if he had been complaining about the failure of more counties in Florida to carry out a manual recount, including especially counties where it was expected that the voters were predominently Republican, that would have made sense too. But he didn't do that either.
What he and his supportwers did was to do everything they could do to obstruct and prevaricate, with the self-evident intention of taking advantage of the fact that he had come in marginally ahead on a count which was clearly very unreliable indeed. Maybe he might in fact have come in ahead on a fair count - but he wasn't going to take that risk. Winning was far more important to him than preserving the democratic processes.
As for the military votes - there are rules agreed in advance about such things. They are meant to stop fraud, fraud which would mean that the votes of military personnel could be stolen by the people carrying out the fraud. I assume that the people drawing up and agreeing the rules been doing so on the basis of possible ways of cheating which they had envisaged, and that these rules would have been agreed on a cross-party basis.
If the rules were genuinely broken, and the safeguards against fraud were removed, clearly they shouldn't be included. If it is not clear whether the rules have been broken, I assume that some kind of court has the duty to rule one way or the other. And I understand that that is what is happening.
As I said, maybe they should call in the Canadians to help sort things out.
Small L for Democrat. Slip-up there. It's from being used to saying "liberal with a small L". But with what's going on down in Florida, maybe the difference between big and small D is getting a bit eroded anyhow...